Re: How to extract a floating point number locale-independantly

[Luiz Henrique de Figueiredo <lhf@...>]

> $ lua -e 'os.setlocale("nb_NO.utf-8") print(tonumber("1.0"))'
> nil
> $ lua -e 'os.setlocale("nb_NO.utf-8") print(tonumber("1,0"))'
> 1,0

This is as expected, right? (BTW, I had to use no_NO.UTF-8 in Mac OS X.)
 
> However it *doesn't* affect lua parsing; which seems to be against the manual.
> 
> >From http://www.lua.org/manual/5.3/manual.html#pdf-tonumber
> > The conversion of strings can result in integers or floats, according to the lexical conventions
> > of Lua (see §3.1).

The text in §3.1 (for both Lua 5.2 and 5.3) is

     A numeric constant (or numeral) can be written with an optional
     fractional part and an optional decimal exponent ...

What may be missing is that there is a *decimal point* before 
the fractional part, and this does not depend in the locale.

> $ lua -e 'os.setlocale("nb_NO.utf-8") print(load([[return 1,0]])())'

This can never work because ',' is never part of a float in the lexer.

Bottom line: in the lexer, float constants can only use decimal points,
as in the C locale. Perhaps the manual entry for tonumber should mention
that tonumber respects the separator of the locale, as you suggest.